Papers › Unleashing the Power of Meta-tuning for Few-shot Generalization Through Sparse...
Unleashing the Power of Meta-tuning for Few-shot Generalization Through Sparse Interpolated Experts
Shengzhuang Chen, Jihoon Tack, Yunqiao Yang, Yee Whye Teh, Jonathan Richard Schwarz, Ying WEI
Recent successes suggest that parameter-efficient fine-tuning of foundation models as the state-of-the-art method for transfer learning in vision, replacing the rich literature of alternatives such as meta-learning. In trying to harness the best of both worlds, meta-tuning introduces a subsequent optimization stage of foundation models but has so far only shown limited success and crucially tends to underperform on out-of-distribution (OOD) tasks. In this paper, we introduce Sparse MetA-Tuning (SMAT), a method inspired by sparse mixture-of-experts approaches and trained to isolate subsets of pre-trained parameters automatically for meta-tuning on each task. SMAT successfully overcomes OOD sensitivity and delivers on the promise of enhancing the transfer abilities of vision foundation models beyond parameter-efficient fine-tuning. We establish new state-of-the-art results on a challenging combination of Meta-Dataset augmented with additional OOD tasks in both zero-shot and gradient-based adaptation settings. In addition, we provide a thorough analysis of the superiority of learned over hand-designed sparsity patterns for sparse expert methods and the pivotal importance of the sparsity level in balancing between in-distribution and out-of-distribution generalization. Our code is publicly available.
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Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Few-Shot Image Classification | Meta-Dataset | SMAT (DINO-VIT-Base-16-224) | Accuracy | 85.27 | #1 of 22 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
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